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Cull Shot

Cull Shot is a single player time attack shooter. It was created for Ludum Dare 29, with the theme “Beneath the Surface”. The player holds a button to charge up a “cull shot”; the longer you hold the button the further the shot is fired. The shot reveals red cubes underneath a diagonal landscape. Pressing another button will capture these cubes, each cube extending the time limit. The objective is simply to last as long as possible.

Cull Shot is the fourth game I’ve created for Ludum Dare, a 48 hour game making competition. I wanted to try creating a single player game for this LD since I’ve noticed multiplayer games are particularly difficult to review. I’m not normally a fan of score attack games, but the simplistic gameplay allowed me to focus and spend time fine tuning the game design and aesthetic. I was very pleased with how the visuals turned out, and feel I was able to give the game more attention to detail than I have my in my previous LD entries. I do feel the scoring should report the number of cubes captured instead of the time survived. It would also be nice to give some sort of extra bonus multiplier for capturing multiple cubes in the same button press or within the same shot, which may lend itself more to a point system instead of the number of cubes captured. Ultimately, once you’ve played the game long enough, you can maintain a full time meter indefinitely. My high score was roughly 30 minutes, when I finally got bored and gave up. The scrolling bold diagonal lines will really do a number on your eyes after that long!